I hope this personal anecdote is telling:
I'm a journalist. Or will be. Depends on how you look at it. I just got a full scholarship + hefty fellowship to attend grad school in Journalism at University of Texas at Austin.
When I graduate, I plan to leave this country for Canada anyway. There are too few jobs in journalism here - even fewer after all those media consolidation mergers go through. Furthermore, most of the "journalism" nowadays is merely "news-entertainment" in the same way the professional wrestling is "sports-entertainment" Hopefully, I plan to move to another country where the laws are freer, the job market for journalism isn't controlled by a handful of major entertainment conglomerates...
Although I might leave earlier if Bush is elected in 2004. There's so many scary things going on with Bush that I can't help but think history is repeating itself.
Assuming some national emergency doesn't call off the elections in 2004, if Bush wins, I'm leaving that month. There's just no place in America for me. I mean it. I want to be able to live my life without constant fear of getting "dissapeared" by my government or without fear of getting sued left and right by corporations.
To grant some perspective on this: I'm scared as hell for this country. Precicely because I know history, and I follow the news.
-- Funksaw
If you do not appreciate the way a company does business, do not do business with that company.
I'm not buying Direct TV. I don't even know if I'm going to be buying cable in my new apartment (AOL/TimeWarner) Cable modem, I'll probably go with the local cable, not the Time Warner broadband.
I'm not going to give money to companies that treat me like a criminal.
The music must be cheap ($.50 or lower per track, $6 or less for an album with 12 or more songs)
I must be able to hear the music before I buy it (30 second samples, low quality 32 mono pieces, whatever)
Here's something that might be interesting to you. Because you're selling indie music, you need to have a reccomendation bar for the tunes, so that the customers can enter in notes about the songs that you cant, like: "This band sounds like Rusted Root." or "We saw this band live, they rocked.'
In order to get people interested, you might also want to encourage bands to provide free samples.
That's why KaZaA isn't doing it. Kazaa Lite is a program developed by a Russian student, which is an illegally modified version of the program.
Even the EULA on KazaaLite says it's illegal, it's just that the only one in a position to press charges lives on the island of Vanatu, and frankly, the irony of suing someone else for infringing on KaZaA's IP is, well, NOT exactly something that they want publicity wise.
This won't kill Fast Track at all, nor will it stop the RIAA. Because there will always be stupid people who A) Don't know it's illegal B) Don't think they'll get caught. In other words, people who don't read Slashdot.
How much of the Justice Department's time and resources will be allocated to the search for pirates? Is there a cutoff point of damages (real or imagined) that an illicit copier would have to produce to even have the matter worth investigating?
-- Funksaw
To paraphrase Dean: "Talk about gun control in Vermont and you talk about taking people's hunting rifles away - talk about gun control in LA and you're talking about taking uzis out of the hands of gangbangers. Gun control needs to be decided at the local level."
Seriously. The vote is tallied, and collected via computer. But there's a printout on paper tape of the vote, when the vote was entered, and the result of the vote. If there's a need for manual recount, it's there. Now, how do we make sure that the paper is the correct one? Print it out, but place it behind a plexiglass screen, so that the voter cannot ALTER it. Then, they have two buttons: "Confirm Vote" "Cancel Vote"
"Confirm Vote" would take the tag, stamp it with a seal, and place in a collection bin in the bottom of the machine. It is *this* vote that counts - the machine just has a record. The Cancel vote? Leads to a shredder.
What Linux needs is a distribution that, by default, makes everything look beautiful and easy. Even if they're not familiar with Linux, making Linux *look* easier than Windows (which still baffles my father after 8 years) would be a humongous step in the right direction.
Moneymen have a way of avoiding such things. I think the better approach is to educate the people who respond to this crap. All the spammers say, "we wouldn't send it if people didn't respond". Amazingly, people do. A public education campaign essentially saying "spam is killing the internet, don't respond to UCE" might cut into the already low response rates to their BS.
Agreed. How should we get the word out to educate the public?
If Intel employees themselves want to receive the email, can they slap a restraining order upon him for writing an email which no one need open, and for which anyone may opt out?
I still think the guy should have just written a last letter, moving to a subscriber based "opt-in" listserv.
Mp3.com was aquired by Vivendi Universal (RIAA member) in a lawsuit.
Since then, Mp3.com's goal has gone from promoting individual (mostly unsigned) artists to promoting Vivendi artists.
Which is why Vivendi won't reconcile the accounts of Mp3.com members who are owed less than $50 (most of them) and why Vivendi artists get top billing.
Cutting the streams isn't new - Mp3.com also limited bands to uploading only one song recently, in a move that angered everyone but Vivendi Universal.
See, I'm sure the bandwidth costs were a factor. But you have to understand, you only cut those expensive items that aren't critical to your business.
Before Vivendi Universal bought Mp3.com, streams were a priority. They allowed new bands to be heard. Multiple songs were also a priority for Mp3.com, because their business was promoting new music.
Now their business is promoting Vivendi Universal music - and compared to returns (since Vivendi can afford to put their music on the radio) it's not that big a deal to them. So it - and the bands it promotes - gets shafted.
Could this have been avoided with a simple opt-in arrangement?
Something along the lines of "Intel has asked me not to mail. If you want to continue recieving letters, please email me with an alternate email address, so you may continue to recieve updates?"
This is bad mojo. I like free speech, but I also like the right of an company to control what goes on their servers. (Anyone who uses their company email for personal correspondance is just asking for trouble.)
And hell, I can see how Intel would think that it's disruptive to the workplace...
I download more than that in linux distributions... sure, getting nytimes.com in 2 seconds instead of 10 is nice, but that's not why I have broadband - I can't imagine anyone thinking that 3GB/mo fits any defintions of "broadband."
I mean, hell, at that point, I might as well just use my 56.6k modem. Thanks for telling me this, I'm definetly going to make sure that my service provider does not put download limits on how much per month I can download - I don't mind speed caps, but I DO mind data caps.
It sounds from the case like Hamidi wouldn't stop emailing Intel employees even after the company asked him to stop.
When Intel took measures to block Hamidi from the servers, and Hamidi continued to find a way around them, the appropriate crime to charge him with is "Harrassment."
IANAL, but that would have been a HELL of alot easier to prove than "electronic tresspass" and probably wouldn't have ended up on the front page of Slashdot.
Hmm, it's not that I don't agree with you that there should be some punishment, but I disagree that the punishment should be $180 million.
Maybe $15,000, maybe $150,000, maybe $1.5 million. Which maybe would have crippled him just as much, I don't know. But an ultra-overboard punishment such as this, that utterly ruins someone's life just goes to show how much influence that corporate monopolies have in our court system.
I don't know what I'm going to do, actually, as far as TV goes. I don't want to get Direct TV after this bullsh*t, I don't want to get cable from Time Warner, all I know is that I might just end up getting rabbit ears.
Actually, copy-protected CDs can be circumvented with a sharpie marker. Anyone who owns a sharpie marker can be put in prison up to 10 years.
Yeah, it's unconstitutional, but Congress, the President, and the Courts use the constitution to wipe their asses everyday.
-- Funksaw
The interesting thing is, you can take out a loan to pay off the RIAA, and declare bankrupcy on *that.*
Of course, I think you'd find it difficult to get a loan - difficult, but not impossible.
THEN... and this is the beauty part. Move to Canada, become a Canadian citizen, your credit history is *wiped.*
-- Funksaw
QUOTE: I also feel sorry for the people that are about to have their lives turned upside down. However, most of these people realized that what they were doing was illegal.
RESPONSE: Most of the Internet thinks that Yahoo (or MSN or whatever the portal on their system is) IS the internet.
I agree, there ARE plenty of bands willing to share files, (and in fact FairForShare is a p2p network designed entirely around bands that do allow p2p sharing.) However, although that's good, it doesn't solve the fundimental problem of the fact that the RIAA has way too much sway in government - to the point where it can ruin people's lives because of business.
"Sticking it" to the RIAA has more than a rebellious point, it's a political message. Anything that accelerates their demise is a good thing.
The problem is all the lives that the RIAA will ruin before they do go down.
Slashdot Mirror
The above moderation is fair. I've just been paranoid lately. I'm sorry.
-- Funksaw
I hope this personal anecdote is telling: I'm a journalist. Or will be. Depends on how you look at it. I just got a full scholarship + hefty fellowship to attend grad school in Journalism at University of Texas at Austin. When I graduate, I plan to leave this country for Canada anyway. There are too few jobs in journalism here - even fewer after all those media consolidation mergers go through. Furthermore, most of the "journalism" nowadays is merely "news-entertainment" in the same way the professional wrestling is "sports-entertainment" Hopefully, I plan to move to another country where the laws are freer, the job market for journalism isn't controlled by a handful of major entertainment conglomerates... Although I might leave earlier if Bush is elected in 2004. There's so many scary things going on with Bush that I can't help but think history is repeating itself. Assuming some national emergency doesn't call off the elections in 2004, if Bush wins, I'm leaving that month. There's just no place in America for me. I mean it. I want to be able to live my life without constant fear of getting "dissapeared" by my government or without fear of getting sued left and right by corporations. To grant some perspective on this: I'm scared as hell for this country. Precicely because I know history, and I follow the news. -- Funksaw
If you do not appreciate the way a company does business, do not do business with that company.
I'm not buying Direct TV. I don't even know if I'm going to be buying cable in my new apartment (AOL/TimeWarner) Cable modem, I'll probably go with the local cable, not the Time Warner broadband.
I'm not going to give money to companies that treat me like a criminal.
-- Funksaw
The music must be good.
The music must be cheap ($.50 or lower per track, $6 or less for an album with 12 or more songs)
I must be able to hear the music before I buy it (30 second samples, low quality 32 mono pieces, whatever)
Here's something that might be interesting to you. Because you're selling indie music, you need to have a reccomendation bar for the tunes, so that the customers can enter in notes about the songs that you cant, like: "This band sounds like Rusted Root." or "We saw this band live, they rocked.'
In order to get people interested, you might also want to encourage bands to provide free samples.
-- Funksaw
You mean nitrous oxide? N2O?
That's why KaZaA isn't doing it. Kazaa Lite is a program developed by a Russian student, which is an illegally modified version of the program. Even the EULA on KazaaLite says it's illegal, it's just that the only one in a position to press charges lives on the island of Vanatu, and frankly, the irony of suing someone else for infringing on KaZaA's IP is, well, NOT exactly something that they want publicity wise. This won't kill Fast Track at all, nor will it stop the RIAA. Because there will always be stupid people who A) Don't know it's illegal B) Don't think they'll get caught. In other words, people who don't read Slashdot.
How much of the Justice Department's time and resources will be allocated to the search for pirates? Is there a cutoff point of damages (real or imagined) that an illicit copier would have to produce to even have the matter worth investigating? -- Funksaw
Come on. We wouldn't vote for Hitler just to spite Bush.
Hitler isn't eligible in the next elections. He wasn't a naturally born citizen of the United States.
Duh.
-- Funksaw
To paraphrase Dean: "Talk about gun control in Vermont and you talk about taking people's hunting rifles away - talk about gun control in LA and you're talking about taking uzis out of the hands of gangbangers. Gun control needs to be decided at the local level."
Hey, I'll take a socialist "people welfare" state over a corpratist "corporate welfare" state anyway. -- Funksaw
At the request of the former President, the Captain's yacht has been renamed from "Nancy" to "Pill Lady."
-- Funksaw
What about behind a plexiglass screen?
Seriously. The vote is tallied, and collected via computer. But there's a printout on paper tape of the vote, when the vote was entered, and the result of the vote. If there's a need for manual recount, it's there. Now, how do we make sure that the paper is the correct one? Print it out, but place it behind a plexiglass screen, so that the voter cannot ALTER it. Then, they have two buttons: "Confirm Vote" "Cancel Vote"
"Confirm Vote" would take the tag, stamp it with a seal, and place in a collection bin in the bottom of the machine. It is *this* vote that counts - the machine just has a record. The Cancel vote? Leads to a shredder.
...but will Mom buy it?
What Linux needs is a distribution that, by default, makes everything look beautiful and easy. Even if they're not familiar with Linux, making Linux *look* easier than Windows (which still baffles my father after 8 years) would be a humongous step in the right direction.
-- Funksaw
Moneymen have a way of avoiding such things. I think the better approach is to educate the people who respond to this crap. All the spammers say, "we wouldn't send it if people didn't respond". Amazingly, people do. A public education campaign essentially saying "spam is killing the internet, don't respond to UCE" might cut into the already low response rates to their BS.
Agreed. How should we get the word out to educate the public?
Hmm... maybe we could just email all of them...
The problem with most anti-spam bills is that they are overbroad. That might be the case here.
The problem is, the bill targets the spam-senders, who are acting pretty much anonymously and out of jurisdiction.
Why not simply target the spam-originators?
I mean, for every "Click here for crap" or something, there's a guy who expects to get *paid.*
Why target the middlemen, when you can go after the moneymen? Why target the supplier when you can target the demand?
Here's the question - can they do that?
If Intel employees themselves want to receive the email, can they slap a restraining order upon him for writing an email which no one need open, and for which anyone may opt out?
I still think the guy should have just written a last letter, moving to a subscriber based "opt-in" listserv.
-- Funksaw
Mp3.com was aquired by Vivendi Universal (RIAA member) in a lawsuit.
Since then, Mp3.com's goal has gone from promoting individual (mostly unsigned) artists to promoting Vivendi artists.
Which is why Vivendi won't reconcile the accounts of Mp3.com members who are owed less than $50 (most of them) and why Vivendi artists get top billing.
Cutting the streams isn't new - Mp3.com also limited bands to uploading only one song recently, in a move that angered everyone but Vivendi Universal.
See, I'm sure the bandwidth costs were a factor. But you have to understand, you only cut those expensive items that aren't critical to your business.
Before Vivendi Universal bought Mp3.com, streams were a priority. They allowed new bands to be heard. Multiple songs were also a priority for Mp3.com, because their business was promoting new music.
Now their business is promoting Vivendi Universal music - and compared to returns (since Vivendi can afford to put their music on the radio) it's not that big a deal to them. So it - and the bands it promotes - gets shafted.
ah...
Could this have been avoided with a simple opt-in arrangement?
Something along the lines of "Intel has asked me not to mail. If you want to continue recieving letters, please email me with an alternate email address, so you may continue to recieve updates?"
This is bad mojo. I like free speech, but I also like the right of an company to control what goes on their servers. (Anyone who uses their company email for personal correspondance is just asking for trouble.)
And hell, I can see how Intel would think that it's disruptive to the workplace...
Well, balls.
3 GB per month down?
I download more than that in linux distributions... sure, getting nytimes.com in 2 seconds instead of 10 is nice, but that's not why I have broadband - I can't imagine anyone thinking that 3GB/mo fits any defintions of "broadband."
I mean, hell, at that point, I might as well just use my 56.6k modem. Thanks for telling me this, I'm definetly going to make sure that my service provider does not put download limits on how much per month I can download - I don't mind speed caps, but I DO mind data caps.
-- Funksaw
"Electronic tresspass," my ass.
It sounds from the case like Hamidi wouldn't stop emailing Intel employees even after the company asked him to stop.
When Intel took measures to block Hamidi from the servers, and Hamidi continued to find a way around them, the appropriate crime to charge him with is "Harrassment."
IANAL, but that would have been a HELL of alot easier to prove than "electronic tresspass" and probably wouldn't have ended up on the front page of Slashdot.
-- Funksaw
Hmm, it's not that I don't agree with you that there should be some punishment, but I disagree that the punishment should be $180 million.
Maybe $15,000, maybe $150,000, maybe $1.5 million. Which maybe would have crippled him just as much, I don't know. But an ultra-overboard punishment such as this, that utterly ruins someone's life just goes to show how much influence that corporate monopolies have in our court system.
I don't know what I'm going to do, actually, as far as TV goes. I don't want to get Direct TV after this bullsh*t, I don't want to get cable from Time Warner, all I know is that I might just end up getting rabbit ears.
Actually, copy-protected CDs can be circumvented with a sharpie marker. Anyone who owns a sharpie marker can be put in prison up to 10 years. Yeah, it's unconstitutional, but Congress, the President, and the Courts use the constitution to wipe their asses everyday. -- Funksaw
The interesting thing is, you can take out a loan to pay off the RIAA, and declare bankrupcy on *that.* Of course, I think you'd find it difficult to get a loan - difficult, but not impossible. THEN... and this is the beauty part. Move to Canada, become a Canadian citizen, your credit history is *wiped.* -- Funksaw
QUOTE: I also feel sorry for the people that are about to have their lives turned upside down. However, most of these people realized that what they were doing was illegal.
RESPONSE: Most of the Internet thinks that Yahoo (or MSN or whatever the portal on their system is) IS the internet.
People are dumb. Way way too dumb.
I agree, there ARE plenty of bands willing to share files, (and in fact FairForShare is a p2p network designed entirely around bands that do allow p2p sharing.) However, although that's good, it doesn't solve the fundimental problem of the fact that the RIAA has way too much sway in government - to the point where it can ruin people's lives because of business. "Sticking it" to the RIAA has more than a rebellious point, it's a political message. Anything that accelerates their demise is a good thing. The problem is all the lives that the RIAA will ruin before they do go down.